Posts Tagged marriage

My friends at the Manhattan Declaration recently unveiled an attractive new web site, along with some valuable tools for spreading their message (1, 2, 3).

For those not already familiar with the project, the Manhattan Declaration is a proclamation seeking to “build a movement of Catholic, Evangelical, and Eastern Orthodox Christians who will stand together alongside other men and women of goodwill to advance the sanctity of life, rebuild and revitalize the marriage culture, and protect religious liberty.”

Remnant Culture has consistently sought to draw attention to the fundamental drivers of human flourishing from a Christian perspective. In illustrating the strong connections between issues like life, marriage, and religious liberty and the broader concerns of the church and society at large, whether religious, cultural, social, economic, or political, the Manhattan Declaration provides a way for Christians to affirm and proclaim the fundamentals of human flourishing. Read the rest of this entry »

I have written previously on the ways in which the current push toward gay marriage is rooted in a larger cultural obsession with self-fulfillment over self-denial. This is not a “gay” or “straight” issue as much as it is an issue of a predominantly self-seeking culture that continues to debase and transform basic definitions of love, commitment, devotion, and sacrifice.

In the same way, a vote for or against marriage amendments like those currently in play in Maryland, Washington, Maine, and my home state of Minnesota doesn’t just represent a moral statement on the ways in which we view gays or straights, but, more fundamentally, it speaks to the ways in which we view our overarching moral and social obligations to others—i.e. to everyone. When we redefine and contort that which is natural and sacred to meet our own personal wants and demands, who else is impacted?

In marriage, and specifically public marriage, our consideration should extend well beyond the husband and wife, or whatever other combination we might try to invent.

Every child has a father. Every child has a mother. And the government does abuse to every child by further legitimizing and promoting the fantasy that this needn’t be the case if the grown-ups wish to pretend differently.

If social justice is about right relationships, then rightly ordering our relationships should be where the marriage debate begins.

Plenty has been said on the Chick-fil-A controversy, and although I didn’t join the masses in yesterday’s food fest, I think their actions and motivations are being unfairly portrayed by a large swath of observers, including many who come at the marriage issue from their same perspective.

Case in point: this article, which has gained significant traction by arguing that supporting an under-fire business, particularly for biblical reasons, constitutes an undue act of aggression or uncharitableness toward one’s enemies:

But if love for Jesus is at the heart of this “appreciation day”, which I think that is the case, then the church’s response to their perceived persecution should be more like Jesus’ responses when he was persecuted or when he saw others persecuted.

He ate with them, talked peaceably with them, healed them, defended them, and when that didn’t work, he died for them.

For me, “shoving it in their face” just doesn’t seem like the response of the Jesus who said “turn the other cheek.” Even if you disagree vehemently with homosexuality and gay marriage, the response Jesus expects from you towards them and those that would decry your position is clear: love them.

Now, I’m all for eating with our enemies, etc. Of course we should love them. But we are talking about a business that was under attack from all sides, and we are talking about a movement that sought simply to “affirm” that business and support it in a season of ridicule and persecution. I know it’s become en vogue to idealize the bloodied church of Nero’s day as being nobler than America’s air-conditioned church subculture, but are we now also expected to sit silently by as our fellow brothers and sisters are set to flames?

No one is being asked to make signs, speeches, or openly demonstrate. The goal is simple: Let’s affirm a business that operates on Christian principles and whose executives are willing to take a stand for the Godly values we espouse by simply showing up and eating at Chick Fil-A on Wednesday, August 1…

…There’s no need for anyone to be angry or engage in a verbal battle. Simply affirm appreciation for a company run by Christian principles by showing up on Wednesday, August 1 or by participating online – tweeting your support or sending a message on Facebook.

From what I’ve observed of yesterday’s goings on, I sense little more than this: affirmation and encouragement. These people aren’t “shoving it in people’s faces.” They are rallying around a company that was elevated as an object of scorn and derision by celebrities, politicians, and cultural elites who wrongly assumed that society would respond by simply rubbing their shoulders and saying “you tell those haters!” Participants see this as “appreciation” (shocker!), as telling Chick-fil-A, “we support you,” and we do so in a world where support for something as age-old and sacred as “man-woman marriage” is routinely accused of being founded in bigotry and hatred.

The irony abounds, from where I sit. Proponents of same-sex marriage continue to paint their ideological opponents as angry, aggressive sandwich tossers, even when it was their own post-modernistic, loosey-goosey, worship-at-the-altar-of-conformity cultural establishment that started this whole mess by persecuting a chicken shack with political threats. Where, when we observe the full scope of these events, does the the bigotry and uncharitable intolerance truly pool and fester?

It was Dan Cathy, Chick-fil-A’s president, who was asked about his views, and it was Cathy’s business that was subsequently discriminated against and threatened by mayors of major cities. Read the rest of this entry »

Murray sees industriousness as one of America’s “founding virtues,” the others of which include honesty, marriage and religiosity. Yet while these others are important, Murray argues that industriousness was the most defining.

The founders talked about this virtue constantly, using the eighteenth-century construction, industry. To them, industry signified a cluster of qualities that had motivated the Revolution in the first place—a desire not just to be free to speak one’s mind, to practice religion as one saw fit, and to be taxed only with representation, but the bone-deep American assumption that life is to be spent getting ahead through hard work, making a better life for oneself and one’s children…If just one American virtue may be said to be defining, industriousness is probably it.

Murray provides plenty of data to indicate a decline in this virtue, including shifting attitudes about work, rises in physical disability benefits applications, decreases in labor force participation, and decreases in hours worked per week.

My conclusion?

The data affirm what many of us already know, and what I’ve made a habit of regurgitating in this space time and time again: Americans have shifted away from an energetic, purpose-driven, higher-order pursuit of value, and are instead moving toward security, insulationism, materialism and minimum-commitment thinking. Rather than building upon our history of sacrificial innovation and difficult labor, regardless of immediate or tangible personal benefits, many Americans are seizing our economic prosperity as an opportunity to slack off and opt for personal leisure, short-sighted consumerism and near-boastful protectionism.

If Murray’s data don’t persuade you, look no further than our country’s lackadaisical response to our debt crisis and our salivating over the pandering promises of our politicians. We yearn to be shielded from competition and globalization, nitpicking over which candidate offshored how many jobs to where. We want to be promised a retirement that no longer exists, and one that will never exist without a painful departure from the status quo. We want the government to do all of our risk-taking and weighty decision-making on our behalf, whether in entrepreneurship, health care, housing or charity. We want to be told that less will be expected of us, not more.

Rather than recognizing and embracing our basic human need to experience earned success, we are becoming more focused on simply putting in our 40 and demanding the stars in return. This shift in our attitudes about work—this decline in our culture of industriousness—is only one factor in this emerging cultural divide, but its corrosive cultural effects have no discernible limitations.

The subject of contracts is not particularly sexy, which is part of the reason I’d like to talk about contracts—and how we might reach beyond them.

In one sense, we have come to ignore, downplay, or disregard the value of contracts. Across the world, we continuously see grand planners like Jeffrey Sachs trying to impose markets and social stability with the flick of their wands, paying little attention to cultural factors like trust and property rights or the institutions required to make contracts mean something. Similarly, here in America, our government seems increasingly bent on diluting or subverting our most fundamental agreements, whether between husband and wife or Foreclosed Billy and his bank.

Yet in other areas, we are overly contract-minded, particularly when it enables us to slack off or lead predictable, controllable lives. Our default setting as humans is to pursue the minimum amount of work for the maximum reward—to put in our 40 hours, shrug our shoulders, and say, “that’s that.” Take the recent union battles in Wisconsin, where protestors proudly insist that their gripes aren’t about the money, but rather, securing a specialized right to privilege and protection. If such an alarming display of entitlement and self-obsessed insulation-seeking isn’t adequate evidence of our new-found comfort level with legalistic, minimum-effort thinking and living, I don’t know what is.

Contracts certainly play an important role in ordering our affairs—as indicated in my preliminary jab at Mr. Sachs—but we mustn’t forget that they can only take us so far. We may indeed need to establish some minimums in our commitment-making (and enforce them accordingly), but that needn’t mean that the minimum is all we aim to achieve.

This is an issue that progressives, conservatives, and libertarians consistently get tied up with, with our discussions consistently centering on words like “coercion,” “obligation,” “voluntaryism,” and all the rest. Yet in trying to understand the dynamics of these features, we must recognize the limits of such categories, lest our aforementioned human tendencies to carve out rationalistic legalistic frameworks impede or limit our thinking about responsibility and commitment to only involve rationalistic legalistic frameworks.

Here’s where that tricky little thing called “love” comes into play, for it so comprehensively breaks such propensities, and, in doing so, shatters the type of line-item, pseudo-rationalistic entitlement and selfishness that ultimately holds individuals back and consequently drags entire families and societies down into the muck.

If there’s one person who understands this, its economist Jennifer Roback Morse, whose book, Love & Economics, argues that love, particularly as encountered in marriage and parenting, helps to show our convenient political-theory buckets for what they are and teach us crucial lessons about how we are to view people and progress. “Familial relationships are not coercive in the usual sense, nor are they voluntary in the usual sense,” argues Morse.

Marriage may be “contractual” in certain ways, but Morse prefers to see it as a “partnership”—one filled with what she calls “radical uncertainty.” “Will we both remain healthy?” she asks. “Will we both continue to be employed at our current level of income and status? Will our needs change in ways we cannot fully predict?”

As Morse notes, a partnership reaches beyond our preferred and overly nit-picky me-vs.-themcomparisons (see also: “love keeps no record of wrongs”), focusing more heavily on the we aspect and thus transforming our efforts to be in service of someone and something higher than ourselves:

Partnerships feature ongoing, joint decision making during the life of the relationship. In purely contractual relationships by contrast, the parties negotiate most, if not all, of the significant decisions prior to entering into the contract. In a partnership, the partners share responsibilities, decision-making, and risks…

…In a partnership, both partners have enough at stake in the relationship that they have an incentive to do all the unstated but necessary things that can be known on the spot and in the moment. The contract is neither the end of the relationship nor the method for how the parties relate to one another.

President Obama’s recent “coming out” on the issue of same-sex marriage has led to a renewed discussion of the issue. Obama’s explanation for his “evolution” (which, in reality, is unlikely an evolution at all) is that his Christian beliefs require it:

When we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated.

Now, I have no issues with the Golden Rule properly applied, but I resent that it’s come to be used not as an imperative for disinterested compassion, but as a bludgeoning tool for legitimizing particular behaviors and supporting an anything-goes moral outlook. At a fundamental level, such a view of “equal treatment” requires us to rid words of meaning and rip truth out of justice, should that particular truth be so awful as to offend so-and-so’s individual choices.

Through this understanding, the President’s refrain goes something like this: “Want to change the definition of an age-old institution? Well, if I wanted to do that, I would certainly want to be appeased.”

And there’s the biggie: I. I. I.

When the Golden Rule is contorted as such, it illuminates how much we’ve come to elevate self-satisfaction and self-affirmation in our society-wide contemplations about morality and justice. Rather than look to things like history, experience, science, or God himself (gasp), we base our actions and outlooks around what we might prefer. And alas, even when we do choose to look at the right sources—as Obama so keenly attempts with his “faith”—we tend to limit their value only insofar as it allows us to throw they’re broader purpose out the window.

The mindset is captured well in Collin Hansen’s analysis of the recent goings on, in which he sums up our current cultural outlook as follows:

God made me this way.

He wouldn’t deny my natural desires.

And I don’t have to explain myself to you or anyone else.

Yet such cultural erosion is by no means epitomized or even made clearest by this frequent battle over whether homosexuality is right or wrong. The push toward homosexual marriage is just one logical step in what has been a decades-long journey down a road of obsessive me-centered self-affirmation, and it certainly won’t be the last. That we’ve come to view homosexuality as the primary issue in the larger debate is unfortunate, yet it is perhaps due to the fact that many Christians don’t seem to think there is a “larger debate.” As Hansen puts it, “The pursuit of self-fulfillment covers a multitude of adultery, divorce, and pornography in our churches. Why shouldn’t it also cover homosexuality?”

Yet there is just as big of a need to re-re-re-(re?)-emphasize the former: Why shouldn’t it also cover the rest?

When we look beyond the issue of homosexual marriage to issues of heterosexual sex, whether we’re talking pre-marital sex/contraception, pre-marital cohabitation, pornography, adultery, or whatever, we see the church becoming more and more comfortable with a version of “love” and “covenant” centered around Individual X’s abstract personal desires and less and less attached to (or interested in) the truth of the Bible and the Gospel. It should come as no surprise that Christians who are fine and dandy with sinful heterosexual lifestyles feel the need to affirm homosexual ones. By their own framework of “truth” and set beside their own moral outlook, such a move does indeed constitute “justice” and “equality.”

Thus, while the question of whether one favors homosexual marriage is indeed an important one for public debate, for the Christian in particular, such popular calls have a deeper Read the rest of this entry »

Whether morality can or should be legislated has been a common topic of this blog, and Micah Watson has some insightful thoughts on the matter over at The Witherspoon Institute.

Here is the opener:

“You can’t legislate morality” has become a common turn of phrase. The truth, however, is that every law and regulation that is proposed, passed, and enforced has inherent in it some idea of the good that it seeks to promote or preserve. Indeed, no governing authority can in any way be understood to be morally neutral. Those who think such a chimerical understanding is possible could hardly be more wrong. For, in fact, the opposite is true: You cannot not legislate morality.

When speaking of these matters, I think a certain distinction needs to be made. Many would read Watson’s words and take away an argument about the inevitability of moral entrance in the realm of political decision making. But while such inevitability is indeed a reality, Watson is pointing to something beyond mere inevitability.

What is often missed is that morality is inherentin all legislative decisions. It is not a matter of this or that, but of this andthis(and so on). Morality is not confined to matters of gay marriage and torture, but is equally involved in those of taxation and sanitation.

Thus, the distinctions we pursue are not to be found in the moral inherence within particular decisions but in the moral consequences thereof.

As Watson continues:

Not every decision has profound moral consequences. But even drawing the line between morally innocent choices and morally culpable choices demonstrates our Read the rest of this entry »

Saying that [Proposition 8] discriminates against gay men and women, a federal judge in San Francisco struck down California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage on Wednesday, handing supporters of such unions at least a temporary victory in a legal battle that seems all but certain to be settled by the Supreme Court.

As usual, the media has been buzzing, but it seems that the majority of the arguments (from both sides) have to do with the morality of gay (or straight) marriage, and whether we as a society should “accept” it.

These are necessary arguments to have, but the fundamental issue at the moment has to do with whether this decision holds up on Constitutional grounds. I would argue that it does not.

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Obviously we can’t just interpret the Equal Protection Clause all by itself (it has years of jurisprudence coloring its words and meaning), but rather than dive into a nuanced, methodical discussion of how we should interpret the clause, I will simply say that I don’t believe the clause has anything to do with homosexual marriage, or heterosexual marriage for that matter.

In this particular instance, perhaps one good way to understand what it should apply to is to detach ourselves from thinking of “marriage” as Read the rest of this entry »

The first time I read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, I was looking for answers.

I was edging into my 20s, getting accustomed to college life, and struggling to get used to what would become a four-year, long-distance relationship with the woman who would later become my wife.

Our relationship had plenty of promise, but it also had plenty of bumps. To put things plainly, I wasinsecure. I was doing everything I thought a good guy was supposed to do. I whispered sweet nothings, paid for meals, and even opened doors for her here and there. But something was causing conflict. No matter how much I did or how much she expressed her devotion, I didn’t feel like I was good enough.

The worst part is that I let her know it.

We were stuck in a rut, and it was all because of me. But rather than realign my perspective and change the way I viewed myself (and our relationship), I thought the answer was to simply let things slide with the hope that things would fix themselves.

To be honest, I was afraid to recognize who I really was.

After all, if I did, I knew I would have to change.

With that as my attitude, Wild at Heart was exactly the book I needed to read.

The book is part diagnosis, part treatment. Eldredge begins by outlining God’s proper design for men, and moves quickly to condemning both modern culture and the modern church for promoting widespread emasculation. This trend, Eldredge argues, has led most men to exhibit a significant amount insecurity (or what he also calls a “false sense of self”). Eldredge wraps things up with a detailed recovery plan — moving step by step through different methods by which men can adjust their behavior and align their outlook to a Biblical perspective.

As I read the book, I slowly began to identify problems in my own life. The more Eldredge began to describe what a Godly man looks like — strong, secure, dependable, selfless, wild — the more I started to Read the rest of this entry »